- Security at America's nuclear weapons labs is so lax
that the facilities have repeatedly failed drills in which mock terrorists
captured radioactive material and escaped, according to an article in Vanity
Fair magazine.
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- "Some of the facilities would fail year after year,"
said Rich Levernier, who spent six years running war games for the U.S.
government until he lost his security clearance in 2001.
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- "In more than 50 per cent of our tests at the Los
Alamos facility, we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and
in some cases didn't fire a shot, because we didn't encounter any guards."
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- These failures occurred despite the fact the security
forces at the Los Alamos National Laboratories and other nuclear facilities
knew the dates of the drills months in advance, according to the story
in next month's Vanity Fair.
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- The report says Levernier, a 22-year veteran of the U.S.
Department of Energy, was stripped of his security clearance ñ effectively
removing him from his job - after he faxed an unclassified document to
The Washington Post.
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- Levernier has filed a Whistleblower Protection Act lawsuit
against the department arguing that he was illegally removed from his duties.
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- Anson Franklin, a spokesman for the National Nuclear
Security Administration, an arm of the DOE that oversees nuclear-weapons
security, told the magazine he could not comment on the allegations because
the lawsuit was pending. But Franklin denied nuclear-weapons facilities
were vulnerable to attack.
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- "The impression has been given that these tests
are staged like football games, with winners and losers," he said.
"But the whole idea of these exercises is to test for weaknesses ñ
we want to find them before any adversaries could ñ and then make
adjustments."
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- The report said a second whistleblower, Chris Steele,
formerly the DOE's senior safety official at Los Alamos, sounded an alarm
after he received an October 2002 safety report for the Radioactive Liquid
Waste Treatment Facility at Los Alamos.
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- Lab officials had analysed various scenarios, including
an airplane crashing into the radioactive waste, and concluded that although
such a crash would cause hundreds of thousands of gallons of nuclear waste
to catch fire, the fire would be put out by the facility's roof-sprinkler
system.
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- "That must be a magical sprinkler system,"
Steele told the magazine, "since it's apparently able to rise up from
the rubble, turn itself on, and put out the flames. We should buy one of
those for every nuclear plant in the country."
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- Steele also discovered and closed a secret nuclear-waste
dump at Los Alamos where contaminated gloves, rags and similar items were
being illegally stored, the article said.
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- Steele lost his clearance on the ground that he was a
security risk after he rejected the "magical sprinkler" plan,
but he regained it this past March and has returned to work, the article
said.
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- © Thomas Crosbie Media, 2003.
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- http://212.2.162.45/news/story.asp?j=82077442&p=8zx78y48&n=82078202
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